Mailing List

Current Drafts

Near-Term Work Items

The group shall focus on a concrete list of near-term work items. For each of the items mentioned below, the goal is to explore system architecture, optimization, and open interfaces across components, through experimental results, simulations, and/or real-world implementations.

Policy-based resource management. NFV Points of Presence (PoPs) will be likely constrained in compute and storage capacity. Since practically all NFV PoPs are foreseen to be distributed, inter-datacenter network capacity is an additional constraint as well. Additionally, energy consumption needs to be bounded, both as a general concern for NFV operators, and in particular for specific-purpose NFV PoPs such as those in mobile base stations. Given these constraints and the highly complex and dynamic nature of the NFV environment, optimized resource management based on policy is a key factor for NFV deployments. Document editors for this work item are Róbert Szabó and Norival Figueira.

Analytics for visibility and orchestration. In the spirit of NFV, network functions should be supportable on general purpose commodity hardware. Real-time monitoring providing insight into various components such as compute, storage, network, energy, and issues related to the cross-interactions among the deployed VNFs are key to not only providing visibility into the NFV infrastructure but also optimizing resource usage for the purposes of orchestration, by means of techniques applying real-time analytics

Security and service verification. Driven by on-demand service offerings, NFV configuration is expected to be dynamic especially in the edge NFV PoP where capacity is limited. While autonomic networking techniques could be used to automate the configuration process including modular updates, it must be taken into account that incomplete and/or inconsistent configuration may lead to security and reliability issues. In the event of network and/or service degradation or failure, there must be suitable coordination, fail-over, and recovery. These reliable NFV mechanisms will also need tools and mechanisms to deploy and manage capability, and close coordination with NFV resource management and performance analytics is also expected. Elasticity of VNFs entails dynamic scale up/down/out/in that must be aware of general resiliency considerations. Finally, the envisaged deployment of arbitrary third-party VNF applications on the network infrastructure of service providers raises significant security concerns and poses challenges for VNF verification in terms of functionality, security and stability under well-defined procedures.

Reliability and fault detection. Fault detection and isolation is a complex problem in the well-known non-NFV network deployments, and it becomes of at least an additional order of magnitude by the introduction of additional root causes for possible faults (hypervisors, containers, underlying infrastructure network, multi-vendor hardware etc.) and the dynamic nature of the NFV environment. In addition to addressing these challenges, a re-interpretation of the current practices in existing infrastructures is necessary, so fault detection becomes effective in mixed NFV and non-NFV networks, that will be the most common deployment in the foreseeable future.

Service orchestration and lifecycle aspects. E2E service is the ultimate goal of any network technology, and NFV deployments must address these aspects to become part of the common practice of network programmers, designers and operators, leveraging commonalities with current cloud infrastructures. All aspects related to service operation and management must be considered, and in particular those that constitute the differentiation of NFV technologies with respect to current non-NFV network deployments: descriptors and description artifacts, the integration with SDN design patterns, the applicability of DevOps? and continuous integration, and the new FCAPS aspects induced by virtualization. Finally, the impact and advantages of new proposals around network management and operation, such as autonomic approaches and intent-based networking must be addressed as well.

Real-time properties. While there is sufficient evidence that VNFs can provide an acceptable performance in practically all environments in which their application has been considered, there are still significative challenges regarding the monitoring, enforcement and management of real-time services based on NFV (a couple of examples could be VoLTE or augmented reality), and how the orchestration of these services has to be performed in order to guarantee those properties,not only at the initial deployment, but during the whole lifetime of the service. While there is sufficient evidence that VNFs can provide an acceptable performance in practically all environments in which their application has been considered, there are still significant challenges regarding the monitoring, enforcement and management of real-time services based on NFV (a couple of examples could be VoLTE or augmented reality), and how the orchestration of these services has to be performed in order to guarantee those properties, not only at the initial deployment, but during the whole lifetime of the service.